Liszt was greatly influenced by the playing of the Gypsy orchestras that he heard in 1840 and 1846, when he spent a few weeks in Hungary. The music they played was mainly verbunkos (recruiting music) and czardas, Hungarian popular artsongs, and sometimes even folk songs. Liszt studied the performance style of the Gypsy musicians with the rigour of a folklorist, and in his sketchbooks he transcribed the songs that he heard with their special stylistic traits. His concerts too featured works pieced together from Hungarian melodies, which later served as proto-studies for the later Hungarian Rhapsodies.

The first 15 rhapsodies appeared in print in 1851-53, with numbers 16-19 written three decades later. Rhapsodies 1-15 and 19 can be traced back to foreign themes, while in nos. 16-18 Liszt used his own thematic ideas. By the 1880s Liszt's musical idiom had changed greatly: by then he was using a simpler, denser piano sound, but all the rhapsodies adhered to the 'lassú-friss' (slow-fast) structure.

As customary, there are two versions of the publication: a blue clothbound edition and a grey softcover edition. The preface, which gives the most important information on the contents and technical details, is identical in both versions, but only the former includes an English description of the sources and a critical commentary. Both versions include facsimiles of pages from Liszt's original autograph manuscript.